Carter Doctrine, Polestar of U.S. Hegemony, is Disintegrating

The reverse side of the neoliberal coin is neoconservatism. Both neoliberalism and neoconservatism got their start in the early 1970s, and by the time of the Carter presidency they had locked in as an essential part of the U.S. body politic.

A neoconservative hallmark is the Carter Doctrine. The Carter Doctrine states that the U.S. will unilaterally use military force to protect its interests in the Persian Gulf.

Though written by Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinki, a famous practitioner of realpolitik, it has been the true north of every Democratic and Republican administration for the last 35 years.

The Carter Doctrine was formulated in response to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, purportedly to counter Soviet hegemony in the region.

Well, we've come full circle (Neil MacFarquhar, "Russian Pilots Launch First Airstrikes in Syria, Officials Say").

The United States failed experiment in Afghanistan is approaching a flatline. Kunduz, the city, finally fell to the Taliban on Monday (Joseph Goldstein and Mujib Mashal, "Taliban Fighters Capture Kunduz City as Afghan Forces Retreat"). But the surrounding province of Kunduz has been under the control of the Taliban for most of the year. So the city falling should come as no surprise.

The story developing is that the Taliban victory in Kunduz seems to have been well plotted. The Afghan government, guided by it U.S. minders, have not been able to retake the city because of Taliban offensives in adjoining provinces. This is from Joseph Goldstein and Mujib Mashal, "Afghan Crisis Grows as Push to Retake Kunduz From Taliban Fails":

After more than a day of relative silence as the situation worsened around Kunduz, the American military showed the first signs of increased involvement in what the Pentagon called “a setback,” conducting at least two airstrikes, and reportedly more as attacks continued at the airport late Tuesday.

Beyond the Taliban’s gains in Kunduz, there was evidence that the insurgents were also pushing a broader offensive in northern Afghanistan, officials said. One particular point of concern was Takhar Province, just east of Kunduz, where the insurgents were said to be heavily assaulting military checkpoints and government facilities in several districts over the past two days.

And this from a breaking story this morning (Joseph Goldstein, "U.S. Strikes Taliban-Held Land Near Kunduz Airport as Afghan Crisis Deepens"):

KABUL, Afghanistan — American warplanes bombarded Taliban-held territory around the Kunduz airport overnight, and Afghan officials said American Special Forces were rushed toward the fighting. But by Wednesday morning, the crisis in northern Afghanistan had deepened, as the Taliban continued to surge outward from Kunduz, the major city that the militants captured on Monday. 

The militants claimed critical stretches of highway and continued to threaten the area around the airport, where hundreds of Afghan soldiers and civilians have been holed up since the city fell. 

Over the past three days, the Taliban have achieved what appears to be their largest military victory in a war that has gone on for more than a decade. Not only have insurgent forces captured a city of about 300,000 people — the first urban center the Taliban has held since 2001 — but as the reeling Afghan government struggles to respond, it has become clear that not only Kunduz but a large chunk of Afghanistan’s north is at stake.

In Baghlan Province south of Kunduz, Afghan reinforcements on their way to the city have been delayed or stopped altogether amid Taliban ambushes along the main highway. It appeared on Wednesday that before the Afghan government could launch a significant counteroffensive in Kunduz, it would first need to reclaim some of Baghlan.

Reinforcements in large numbers “will not be able to reach Kunduz without a big fight,” said Ted Callahan, a Western security adviser based in northeastern Afghanistan.

Abdul Shaker Urfani, a member of a community council in a northern part of Baghlan, said that more than 1,000 Afghan soldiers and police officers were stuck in the province. They were trying to reach Kunduz, “but they can’t break the Taliban resistance,” Mr. Urfani said.

So much for Obama's ballyhooed "end of U.S. combat operations" in Afghanistan. With superior Taliban planning -- quite a feather in the embattled Mullah Akhtar Mansour's turban -- it appears the north has been lost to the government of Ashraf Ghani, which today marks its one-year anniversary.

Obama has been a profound failure. Back in the heady days following his first landslide election, when I still believed in the illusion that he was a politician who was going to transform the system, in the back of my mind was the shadow that what we had here was another Jimmy Carter.

As it turns out that doubt was indeed prescient. Obama is a two-term Jimmy Carter who will usher in a Trump instead of a Reagan, at the same time as the temple of U.S. unipolar hegemony (i.e., the Carter Doctrine) comes crashing down.

Moon of Alabama, a Blog to Add to Favorites

An excellent blog to consult for information on the civil war in Syria is Moon of Alabama. Today's post is devoted to the Patrick Cockburn story about the Free Syrian Army (FSA) laying down their arms to the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) in the city of Tal Kalakh. The rebels are denying it. Al Jazeera, a reliable jihadi propaganda pipeline, was reporting a large column of smoke rising from the city. Cockburn said he was there at the time and saw no smoke.

Cockburn sees locally negotiated cease fires like the one in Tal Kalakh as a way forward. Syrians are sick of the fighting. Only the mercenaries and their monarchical Saudi and Qatari paymasters, along with a clueless Uncle Sam and the old colonial powers, want more bloodshed.

Another good post I saw on Moon of Alabama is The National Interest interview with Zbigniev Brzezinski. Brzezinski thinks that if Syria is cracked the United States and Israel will suffer beyond anything that either country is prepared for.

****

Tonight listening to the Roadhouse with Greg Vandy I heard a good cut off Booker T. Jones' 2011 album, The Road from Memphis. Here's "Representing Memphis" (Sharon Jones on vocals):

New York Times Against Arming Syrian Rebels

Thankfully, the New York Times in an unsigned editorial this morning is coming out against military intervention in Syria. Excellently titled, "After Arming the Rebels, Then What?" it concludes:

Like most Americans, we are deeply uneasy about getting pulled into yet another war in the Middle East. Those urging stronger action seemed to have learned nothing from the past decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, which has sapped the United States and has produced results that are ambiguous at best.

This is exactly the right thing to emphasize as the war pigs clamor for antitank guns and no-fly zones. Have we learned nothing? Are we so bereft of intelligence that we repeat disastrous military commitments in the name of a fictional Lebensraum of the Western mind -- "democracy." How's "democracy" doing in Afghanistan? How's "democracy" doing in Iraq?

The Wall Street Journal reported this week what a no-fly zone would look like. Plans have been drawn up to enforce a no-fly zone from Jordan stretching 25 miles into Syria. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov reminded the West today that such a no-fly zone would be illegal and he rejected U.S. allegations of Syrian government poison gas use. Echoing UN Secretary Ban Ki moon (see Colum Lynch's Turtle Bay blog), Lavrov, according to The Associated Press, "said Saturday that the evidence of Syrian chemical weapons use cited by the U.S. is not reliable and doesn't meet requirements of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons."

He said the organization specifies that samples taken from blood, urine and clothing can be considered reliable evidence only if supervised by organization experts from the time they are taken up to delivery to a laboratory.

Peter Baker has a frontpage story, "Heavy Pressure Led to Decision by Obama on Syrian Arms," outlining the war going on within the Obama administration over Syria. Obama, Baker reports, is fighting hawks in the foreign policy establishment; he's trying to keep U.S. military involvement to a minimum. There's a good quote from Zbigniev Brzezinski:

Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, said he was “baffled” by Mr. Obama’s decision to become more deeply involved. “What exactly is our objective?” he asked. “It’s not clear to me that every nondemocratic government in the world has to be removed by force.” 

The Syria war is a struggle for power, not democracy, he said. “Is that something we should be engaged in?”

Brzezinski, the architect of our current entrenched military occupation of the Middle East, has had a change of perspective in the decades since he helped formulate the Carter Doctrine.

It's important to keep in mind what we know from reading the paper every morning. Most of the rebels fighting in Syria, now beginning to be described in the Western press as insurgents, are foreign fighters responding to fatwas issued by prominent Sunni clerics calling for jihad. We know that these jihadi are no match for Hezbollah and the Syrian military, more weapons or no. As the fighting rages in the rebel-held Aleppo neighborhood of Sakhour, the opposition's only hope remains direct military intervention by the West.

Can Obama hold the line against the war pigs? He just might be able to. His legacy and the future of the Democratic Party depend on it, not to mention any hope for peace and the territorial integrity of the current Middle East.